Why 'Cyber Monday' is mostly myth

“While traditional retailers will be monitoring store traffic and sales on Black Friday (the day after Thanksgiving), online retailers have set their sights on something different: Cyber Monday, the Monday after Thanksgiving, which is quickly becoming one of the biggest online shopping days of the year.”

Ta-dah! The term “Cyber Monday” was born.

The only problem: It’s mostly a marketing gimmick, according to consumer electronics experts and an online metrics tracker.

Typically, a Monday in December takes that title, and Lipsman predicted the biggest online retail day of 2010 will be on December 13.

In 2009, Cyber Monday was the second-biggest e-commerce day of the year, but Lipsman said that was an outlier case, influenced by the recession. Usually, Cyber Monday is the seventh to ninth biggest day for e-commerce. “This year I think consumers are starting to open up their wallets a bit more, and I would expect that Cyber Monday starts to move down the list” of the biggest online retail days of the year, he said.

Dan de Grandpre, editor-in-chief at DealNews, said products listed on sale on the Monday after Thanksgiving tend to be “the dregs” that didn’t sell on the Friday after Thanksgiving. Some high-end retailers do hold Cyber Monday sales, he said, but some already started on Friday or Sunday and others won’t begin until the second or third week in December.

Ellen Davis, vice president of the National Retail Federation, which owns CyberMonday.com (and Shop.org), said the “Cyber Monday” term originated organically as retailers noticed that consumers turned to the internet to shop on the Monday after Thanksgiving.

“The trend was actually developed by shoppers and started in ’02, ’03,” she said, adding that the federation just put a name to the concept.

The number of people shopping online on the Monday after Thanksgiving has grown steadily since 2005, when an estimated 59 million said they would shop online on that day, to 2009, when that number jumped to 96 million, Davis said.

Furthermore, she said, several online retailers are offering deals that are specific to Cyber Monday. Among those with deals, she said, are eBags.com, Ice.com, Drugstore.com, Soap.com, Diapers.com, LuckyBrand.com and Fashionbug.com.

But all of those sites were offering deals on Friday, too, meaning they weren’t holding out for Cyber Monday promotions. Ice.com listed a “Black Friday Blowout Sale.” Drugstore.com advertised “cyber week savings,” instead of highlighting Monday.

Perhaps the most interesting thing to be learned from Cyber Monday is that Mondays — after Thanksgiving or not — are usually big days for e-commerce.